Inescapable
by monstrous.crow
Summary: Because we choose our fates, like it or not, and sometimes we can't run away from our memories even when new factors are thrown into the equation. A short vignette on being left behind.


**A/N: **I'm sorry, my updates have been all over the place. I've been really bad about updating my drabbles in particular; I sort of have bursts of creativity and then forget about them. Do rest assured that I do intend to continue them and I'm picking them back up again, Savoir-faire and Profundity in particular. Oh, and I don't own! Though I wish I did, I've been in love with the soundtrack to Bebop for years. In any case, please enjoy. And please review, I love feedback!

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><p><em><strong>Inescapable<strong>_

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><p>"Where do you think you're going?"<p>

She raises the gun then, points the barrel at him and thumbs back the safety, because it's not fair. It's just not _fair._

"Why are you going?"

He can't leave her now, not now when she's remembered everything, not now that she's finally accepted that she has a new life with new rules and new precious people that she has memories of.

He looks at her then, really looks at her, straight in the eye, and it has more meaning than anything he could say.

_Don't follow after me._

_You'll just get hurt._

_I've only ever hurt the people who cared about me._

_So don't you dare chase me._

"You told me once to forget the past, 'cause it doesn't matter. But you're the one still tied to the past, Spike!"

She yells it, desperate, searching, even as she lets down her guard, lowers her weapon, leaving herself open for the first time in forever. _Please don't go away. Please._

"Look at my eyes, Faye."

_I don't want you to go._

He leans in close, his face so close, yet so far as he bows down towards her in an awful parody of something much more tender that they could have never had.

"One of them is a fake because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I've been seeing the past in one eye, and the present in the other. SO I thought I could only see patches of reality, never the whole picture."

"Don't tell me things like that," she says, but her voice wavers even though she doesn't want it to. "You've never told me anything about yourself, so don't tell me now."

"I felt like I was watching a dream I'd never wake up from."

And he smiles then, a wry twist of his mouth, too sharp, too cynical, even as his eyes gaze into and through her with too much understanding and altogether too much pity.

"Before I knew it, the dream was all over."

And she turned away then, silently weeping, because though she'd always known it deep down she'd never let herself admit it until now.

_He was lost long before we ever met. _

So she lets herself cry over him (but doesn't let him see, oh no, she's not that weak, never that weak) for the first and last time, and she lashes out with fists, all her meaningful words swallowed up by her sobs.

_God, I hate you._

He huffs as he steps aside and begins to walk away, a tiny sound in the tinny confines of the hallway.

_I know._

But he pushes past without so much as another word, because he knows she won't shoot.

She loves him, after all.

_You never could bear to really hurt me, could you?_

And she screams long and broken as she empties her bullets into the ceiling, because she wants to _hurt_ him, to break him until he's free, to make him see her, to make him _stay,_ but he already sees her, she knows, and she couldn't, oh no. She can't, _can't,_ not even when he's leaving her behind, drifting further into the dream she knows he'll never wake from now, not until he's moved into the next.

She thinks there's an unspoken apology in the echo of his footsteps, and she's not wrong.

He keeps going, though, because that's what he _does._

He keeps going and flies away free through the starry sky just like a bird, but it's a lie because he's always trapped.

_I can't escape the past._

He thinks maybe he could've if he'd stayed, but he would never have been happy, not really. He might even love her.

But he loved _her_ first.

And he's always chased her. _Always. _He's always chosen her, always fallen into that dream, and it's all he knows.

_I guess this is goodbye._

_I am sorry, you know._

_But..._

_I was bound to my fate a long time ago. _


End file.
